I run a business and I absolutely would fire a customer for being needlessly rude to an employee. If they're angry at the employee they can direct their 'feedback' to me. But yeah this 'the customer is always right' chunk of American culture needs to die- abusing employees is not 'feedback', nor is it acceptable
I also run a business. I’m a customer of Mailgun as well. As a business it’s not hard to enforce boundaries without going for the nuclear option. Everybody has bad days sometimes, and just as we want customers to be understanding when we have downtime we can be understanding when customers are irate.
In my experience customers get rude when they are already unhappy and have been for a while. In the case of Mailgun their service is very mediocre (unreliable api, slow, etc) and I don’t think they care. Does this justify rudeness towards support staff? No, but people tend to be much nicer when they’re generally happy with the service they get for their money.
Calling out aggressive and uninvited outreach from a vendor is extremely different from "the customer is always right" mentality. The two things are not the same.
Rudeness is often just a mask for something else. Look behind the rudeness and you find frustration and a need to be heard. Emotion is a bit like a pendulum, one side is anger, the other is happiness, and in the middle is neutral. If you just listen and try and genuinely connect, the pendulum can swing back. In my experience some of the rudest customers became our biggest advocates. It's the neutral customers that you never hear from that can be the most difficult because they just churn away without any actionable feedback.
Specifically to the sales tactic, hopefully everyone knows it's a tactic, and it works because it elicits responses. People crave genuine connection and disingenuous emails like this can be trigger points, but alas the incentive structure of inside sales teams is often to elicit any response. It's the modern day "calling at dinner time because you know someone will be home" trick.
